Theology and Social Commentary

Author Archives

I recently was part of a church event in which I was asked to speak about the conflict between science and the Bible, especially over the matter of creation (audio/text here). My argument, as ever, is that the big question concerns the genre of the creation stories. The biblical creation story can be read quite naturally as belonging to any of three or four genres, not all of which commit the reader to a specific view of how creation came about in space and time, and so there is no necessary conflict between the two.

The point about genre is easy enough to demonstrate, but still unsettles people (I suppose people generally prefer certainty over possibility), and sure enough, I received a letter that read as follows:

Dear Jordan,

I am really sorry that you have had unfortunate experiences in trying to defend your faith when coming up against the “scientific community”. Please receive the enclosed newsletter I have just received this very week as a gift. May your confidence grow in our God’s word & the knowledge of His sovereignty daily.

In His love,
[Illegible signature]

I was upset by the letter, because contrary to everything that I said, it implies that I disbelieve the Bible’s view on creation, rather than what I repeatedly said, which is that there are several genres into which the creation narratives can reasonably fit, and that a text can be figurative without being less true. (An example that I used was the book of Revelation, which talks of beasts rising from the sea etc.; though we take it figuratively, we do not believe itany less than the more literally historical texts in the Bible).

I was unable to discover who sent the letter, but in any event, I can’t really blame this person. Standing behind this view is one or more Creationist organisations that have made misunderstanding and vilifying dissenting Christian voices into an art-form. The enclosed newsletter to which the letter refers was produced by CMI, and it perfectly demonstrates their refusal to entertain any view that varies from their own, which in turn leads to faithful Christian people being defined as compromisers or doubters or in some other way defective.

I have scanned the document in full for you to read here, but I would like to respond to several of the points that it makes, because whatever you think about Creationism itself, an organisation that has been speaking to Christians for as long as CMI has no excuse for pretending that there is only one Christian view of Genesis 1-11. I have the highest regard for several friends and family members who hold Creationistic views, but this divisive CMI tactic is anti-gospel, and it’s about time that we all stop putting up with it.

1. Creationism denial is Creator denial

‘The crying need for the faithful proclamation of biblical creation should hardly need highlighting. Is the Church as a whole awake on this issue? The answer is a clear and categorical no! On the contrary, there is a widespread refusal, even on the part of many professed evangelical Christians, to empha­sise (or even to acknowledge) Paul’s teaching. The Bible makes clear that Creation-denial (“the things that have been made”, Romans 1:20) is tantamount to Creator-denial (“For although they knew God, they did not honour him as God”, 1:21), and that idolatry directly follows (“because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator”, 1:25).’ —Philip Bell, CMI

The first thing that CMI refuses to understand is that non-Creationists are not denying creation or their Creator. This is a deeply ingrained error; so much so that I often find myself explaining to other Christians that ‘Creationist’ and ‘someone who believes that God is the Creator of all things’ are not the same thing.

Many of us non-Creationists are saying little more than that it is not the author’s intention in Genesis 1-3 to tell us how the universe was created (i.e. to describe the order of events, time period etc.), but rather, the clear purpose is theological—it lays out the biblical worldview (i.e. the place of man and woman within creation, and in relation to God). And in fact, even when Creationists talk about the theological meaning of Genesis 1-3, these are the same things they speak about. It is clearly the central purpose of the stories; the ‘how’ question is secondary in any responsible interpretation of the text (and is never given any importance elsewhere in scripture).

Us ‘professed evangelicals’ who deny that this secondary matter is within the text’s purview continue to affirm with the rest of scripture that God was the active agent in the creation of the world, no matter what mechanism was used to bring it about.

2. Creationism is essential to the gospel

‘The hope of the Gospel is the only answer to this sorry state of affairs. The message “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15) is the Good News indeed… Without an understanding of the reliability and relevance of biblical creation, people will continue to languish in their ignorance, deceived and deceiving each other (2 Timothy 3:13)… By proclaiming Creation in a scientific age we expose the folly of worldly thinking, while simultaneously pointing people to the Creator-and-Saviour of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ…

‘We proclaim Creation, not only because it is true, but because effective evangelism requires it. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is founded on an historical Adam and Eve, the serpent tempter, the taking of the forbidden fruit, and the promise of the Victor over Satan (Genesis 3:15). History’s simple message—all are sinners; sin’s penalty is death, spiritual and physical; Christ came to deliver us from sin’s penalty and power, and from the sting and dominion of death—is founded on historical events recorded in Genesis.’ —Philip Bell, CMI

One could quibble with several details in these quotes—not least the idea that they ‘expose the folly of worldly thinking’, because while the gospel certainly exposes human sin and rebellion, Creationism tends to devolve into squabbles about the interpretation of cherry-picked scientific evidence.

The main issue, however, is that CMI thinks the proclamation of Creationism—not biblical creation—is essential to evangelism. The reason is again that they assume that there is no difference between the theology of Creation (which all evangelical Christians believe—see point 1) and their literal-historical hermeneutic that leads to creation science. So anyone who leaves room for non-literal elements in the text must disbelieve biblical creation.

I made a semi-serious quiz for my narrative-exegesis class that can help to illustrate the basic error that CMI makes here. The quiz takes the form of true/false questions such as:

History is: T/F
Metaphor is: T/F

These questions are obviously foolish; history and metaphor in general are neither true nor false—they are descriptions of reality that may be accurate or inaccurate. Our school textbooks in Apartheid South Africa taught skewed history that served our white racist ideology (it was a false explanation of real events); conversely, Jesus taught in parables, which are figurative, but Christians would argue are true descriptions of reality.

Nevertheless, I am proud of my T/F quiz, because it exposes the kind of bias that many of us carry, and which CMI smuggles into their argument about Creationism and the gospel: something must be fully history to be true; figurative language would mean it didn’t happen (metaphor is false).

What CMI refuses to hear is that evangelical non-Creationists also believe those key gospel ideas that are listed in the article: that God is Creator, that humankind fell into sin and are subject to death, and that Christ died and rose again to reunite us to God. The gospel depends on all of that being true. It does not depend on all of Genesis 1-11 being literallyhistorical. Whether God made the world in 6 days or 6 billion years, it doesn’t change the truth that God is the Creator. The 6 days could be representative of any number of things (order, preparedness, 6 ages etc.) without changing the basic truth on which the gospel depends.

Ironically, the thing that finally made me not-a-Creationist was the realisation that Creationism does not help to proclaim the gospel. On the contrary, it makes a battleground out of the scientific mechanism by which God created—something that doesn’t actually matter all that much. Rather than teaching the gospel, it usually gets lost in trying to cure people of evolution, a distraction that offers no guarantees of also curing their rebellion against God.

3. Jesus was a Creationist

‘The Bible clearly teaches the creation of all things in six days a few thousand years ago (Genesis 1–2); the intrusion of sin and the Curse, blighting the originally perfect universe physically and morally (Genesis 3); the geographically global, devastating Flood (Genesis 6–9); and the historicity of Babel, with the confusion of human language (Genesis 10–11). Furthermore, Jesus and all the New Testament writers affirmed this view of Genesis 1–11.’ —Philip Bell, CMI

The view that Jesus and the apostles were Creationists makes regular appearances in Creationist arguments, but again it makes basic errors.

Firstly, it assumes that the only true presentations of history are literal presentations. What the NT says about Genesis 1-3 certainly depends on it being true history. However it is simplistic and mistaken to think that this requires it to be literal history. There are several ways of presenting history that are not literal. For example, the Bible often stylises history in poetic forms, and the book of Revelation presents the future history of the church age in a highly symbolic way, and yet we take it as true though it is not literal.

For example, Judges 5 says that the Lord marched down from Edom, and that the stars fought for Israel. This is not literal but it is true. And the NT could comfortably look back on that war and affirm that the stars contended against Canaan without implying that actual stars came and fought. The form of the original can be repeated without implying anything about its literalness or otherwise. In the same way, the NT can repeat elements of the creation narratives without implying anything about the literalness or figurativeness of the original.

The genre of Genesis 1-3 is the big question. It could be literal history, but it could be poetic, or like the prophetic literature, or a special genre used for worldview stories. In any of the latter three, whatever really happened in creation would be stylised in order to clearly communicate the significance of what happened, rather than the historical detail of it. It would no longer be the Creationist’s brand of literal history, though it would remain true. And crucially, none of these genres would necessitate any change to the way in which the NT refers to it. Jesus can still affirm the form of the original and its significance without implying anything about how literally it should be taken.

The second problem with the CMI argument is again the confusion of biblical creation and Creationism. The things in the creation story that the New Testament affirms are relatively few. The NT interest in creation overlaps with the Creationist interest in creation in a handful of small ways. To say on this basis that the NT teaches 6-day young-earth Creationism is presumptuous to say the least.

Take for example the one place in the NT in which I can find reference to the seven days—Hebrews 4:

3 For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said,“As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest,’”although his works were finished from the foundation of the world.4 For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.”

Clearly the issue is the theology of rest not the mechanism of creation. This does not teach young-earth Creationism; it merely refers to the significance of the creation story, using the terms in which that story has been communicated in the canon. It would make no difference to Hebrews 4 if God finished founding the world in six minutes or six trillion light years, as long as that process reached a state of rest. So this passage fits into the creationist view, but it fits just as comfortably into mine.

Perhaps the more irksome issue in CMI’s line of argument here is the degree of arrogance that underlies it. Firstly, the starting line is that the Bible ‘clearly teaches’ young-earth Creationism. This might seem like an innocent statement, but consider that this is being written by the CEO of CMI in Europe. This is a person who is surely well aware of old-earth Creationists and evangelicals of various other convictions whose singular point is that the teaching of the Bible depends on the intended meaning of the text, not just on what it says on the surface. It is far from clear that the science of creation plays any role at all in the teaching of Genesis. To say that Creationism is clearly taught is incredibly disingenuous and represents a breath-taking dismissal of thousands of faithful Christians who study the Bible with complete devotion and yet have arrived at a different conclusion on a secondary matter.

Secondly, the argument he is making is not exegetical; he is not explaining how these texts must be understood in a Creationist way. He is merely citing NT references to Genesis 1-11 as though Christians such as me have either never read the NT or have had to tear those pages out of our Bibles so that we can hang onto our supposedly warped views of creation. To claim NT citations as evidence of Creationism is wrong. To merely point them out as though I couldn’t possibly have read that far in my Bible without having become a Creationist is insulting.

4. Non-Creationistic views dishonour God

‘Last, but not least, God is glorified when we uphold the Word of God and proclaim its teaching on Creation and the Creator. His name is honoured. The same cannot be said for teaching which undermines the same even if by well-meaning Christians. Christians seeking to live godly lives in this ungodly world should be at the forefront in repairing and restoring the breaches in the foundations and walls of Christendom (Isaiah 58:12). We need to hold fast to our confession of faith in Christ (Hebrews 10:23), making every effort to contend for the faith handed down to us by previous generations of faithful believers (Jude 3). Proclaiming Creation in a scientific age should be a staple part of every Christian’s engagement in the good fight of faith (1 Timothy 6:11–12).’ —Philip Bell, CMI

This final quote would be perfectly fine if it were not that we have already been made aware that CMI operates on different definitions of the gospel and what it means to uphold the Word of God. This quote sums up nicely the problem that organisations such as CMI perpetuate in the Christian world. There is nothing unusual in asking questions about the genre of a biblical text, nor in revising interpretation on the basis of new research—this is the basic stuff of exegesis that happens continually. But for some reason, asking these basic and necessary questions of Genesis is out of bounds.

And so, CMI has taken it upon itself to publicly define anyone who does not unquestioningly apply their literalist hermeneutic as in violation of the faith, as doubters of scripture, and as dishonouring to God. It doesn’t matter to them that they’ve been told repeatedly that other evangelicals do proclaim creation and the Creator; that we agree on the central theology of Genesis 1-11; that we are passionate about the careful, faithful exegesis of scripture; and that we contend daily for the gospel of Jesus Christ. None of these things actually matter to them. What matters is their fight against secular science, and anyone who doesn’t support them in that fight is an enemy. And so they have spent the last 40 years refusing to listen, and making it their public ‘ministry’ to condemn Christians who see things differently.

I am completely in favour of Christians holding to Creationist convictions if they are persuaded by the evidence that this is the best reading. I am totally happy for scientists and researchers to try and prove divine design or to overturn the evolutionary paradigm if it is incorrect. But it is about time that we stop supporting organisations such as CMI that maintain a studied refusal to listen to other Christians and who willfully breed division and judgement on a matter that is demonstrably secondary to the faith.

I’m looking into the topic of Christianity and science for a presentation, and I came across this interesting claim:

In 1861, the French Academy of Science–very prestigious scientific body–published a booklet giving 51 “scientific facts” said to disprove the authority and reliability and dependability of Scripture. Fifty-one scientific facts that showed the Bible was wrong. That was in 1861. That’s not really very long ago.

Today’s scientists dismiss all 51 of those statements, and say not one of them is right. In other words, scientific facts often contradict things previously called facts, and that’s a fact!

This quote comes from a lecture by John Blanchard in 2004, and it interested me, so I tried to find some source documents to see what sorts of things had been raised and debunked.

Several Christian and atheist forums have apparently had the same idea, and have drawn a blank. Writers on the forums report finding the same ‘fact’ repeated several times in print, (according to the forums) more than once by Loraine Boettner as early as the 30s and 40s, by WA Criswell in the 60s, and a few others since. It is regularly repeated on Christian websites. None of the writers who published this anecdote backed it up with any evidence. A forum member went as far as contacting the FAS itself and they denied record of any such document (see here on GodandScience.org).

It is unfortunate that claims such as this are treated as fact and used in argument without any concern for credibility. As one forum member points out here, it is not a harmless mistake, because,

it “poisons the well” against any past, current, or future, scientific discoveries which contradict biblical literalism…

In other words, it serves as justification for Christian apologists to irresponsibly ignore any inconvenient scientific claim on the grounds that it’ll be reversed in 50 years anyway. Science is clearly in the business of making provisional claims, and many will be overturned. But this kind of anecdote allows one to pretend that science has horoscope-like levels of credibility, which is clearly far from the truth and unhelpful as an argument.

I would love for someone to present the evidence behind this anecdote—please send it to me if you have it—but until proven otherwise, let’s do our science-loving opponents the kindness of not retreating behind comfortable fictions.

My wife belongs to a FaceBook group called South Peninsula Moms in which someone was asking where to get a ‘smudging’ specialist for her new house. I thought it was a paint technique, but it turns out that it is a spiritual thing in which someone waves burning sage and visualises blessings upon the house, and then cleansing of the house and good luck results.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it promises good luck and spiritual freedom–and gives you the illusion that you’re taking control of spiritual things–but it ends up putting you into deeper bondage, because every time something undesirable happens, you have to wonder what spirit you have to appease or what force you forgot to unlock, and you’re stuck paying some huckster to wave smoke at your problems. And you’re forced to believe that the same spirit powerful enough to bring luck to your house is also gullible enough to be paid off with a sage offering.

Say what you want about Christianity, but about similar impulses in the 1st century, it says, ‘For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.’ (Galatians 5:1). Plus it is offering relationship with the Creator, not maybe some good luck via some underling (if you pay).

He manages to set aside the inevitable griping about its accuracy and to judge it for what it is actually trying to say. The review helped me to understand why Scott made the movie and why he did so with so little concern for preservation of the biblical account. Good read.

Digging up some old notes from a class I no longer teach, I found this little introduction to a lecture about exegesis. It is an exhortation to prospective preachers on the importance of their task and the necessity that they remember that they’re not celebrities.

The Preacher’s Profile

Dear Preacher,

I encourage you to look in the mirror each morning and tell yourself two things:

You are boring.

You are not funny.

If you were a philosopher, motivator or an entertainer, how many people would come willingly to hear you speak? For most of us: about zero. Given that this is true, how fair is it of you to imagine that the audience is there to hear you, when they are clearly only there because they feel they have to be? Because you have a captive audience who believes that it is God’s command that they are there, they will sit through almost any garbage you can throw at them, and they’ll appreciate it no end when you make your speech more tolerable for them through anecdotes and jokes. Their appreciation – the fact that they laugh so hard when you say something lame about sports – might delude you into thinking that you are a treat to listen to. No; you are boring and you are not funny, and the longer you remember that, the better. You are to resist the temptation to make yourself a minor Sunday-morning celebrity. The only thing that makes you valuable up front of the church on a Sunday is that you have been tasked with the awesome responsibility of speaking God’s words.

You are boring. The Bible is not.

I get so disappointed when I go to church, and the preacher never goes any deeper than what this or that verse very obviously says on the surface. The passage says something about God’s love, and so the preacher starts talking about four kinds of love, including an anecdote here, an illustration there, a neat application etc. Boring sermons are criminal, NOT because we should be interesting, but because the bible IS interesting. It’s deep and inspiring and challenging and surprising. It is God speaking to us. We believe that God has spoken in his Word, and that the text therefore says the most important things in the world. How can that be boring?

Exegesis is like digging a mine. Digging is hard work and it’s time-consuming. We don’t do it because we like holes, but because we expect to find gold. If you haven’t laboured to understand why God had a passage preserved for you for millennia, and if you haven’t seen the surprises and challenges in the text, and if you haven’t been excited by what God says, you can bet that almost no one else will be.

Being orthodox is extremely important, but not saying anything wrong is not the same as saying something right. You can be not wrong without ever preaching an expositional sermon. To exegete a text requires that you actually listen to what the text is saying. It means scratching beneath the surface. It means asking ‘why?’ all the time.

Consider James 3:14-15. You can preach that text unthinkingly: ‘Envy and bitterness are bad. Got it.’ And you’ll never need to ask yourself why James has to point out to his reader the massively obvious fact that envy and selfishness are not wisdom from heaven! Why am I not surprised by something that the author expects that I’ll find surprising?

I am certainly guilty of expecting the Bible to be all religious and austere, and so will your congregation. When we expect it to be boring and conservative, we don’t really notice that it contains humour and irony and hyperbole. You don’t notice that Paul is including a bad joke about Cretans in Titus, or that the story in Judges about Micah’s idols is supposed to be a farce. You notice those things when you ask ‘why?’.

So, all this hard labour aims at clarifying what God has said, so that when you stand up in front of your audience, you can speak God’s words — the most important words in the world — instead of trying to make your generic theologisms more interesting by being a Sunday morning entertainer.

I’m teaching some biblical exegetical classes at the moment, and one of the things that I feel it is necessary for aspiring exegetes to understand is that teaching the Bible responsibly is more than just pointing out and explaining some things that lie on the surface of the text. Exegetes need to use original languages, background study etc. to investigate the setting of the text and to fix the relationships between its component parts. Exegetes need to take a view that goes well beyond what is demanded of the usual reader.

I found an interesting parallel of this in an article about some expert football commentators who are renowned for their eye for detail. The article describes the view of the game that these experts prefer:

“Watching Neville and Carragher watch football is an education. Their favourite toy is boot-room cam, a camera providing a view of the entire pitch so they can monitor the whereabouts of all 22 players at all times. “The viewer wants to see where the ball is and what’s going on around it, so we watch it differently,” Neville says. (Source: Guardian)

While it gives a less dramatic view of the game, watching all players at once gives them an idea of the movement, positional play and tactics being employed at any one time. Obviously, it would be turgid and boring if the experts discussed all the details and interrelationships that they observed, or if they mentioned the unseen just to show off. But their expertise enables them to give insight into the game that other viewers would have missed, and it prevents them from making superficial judgments about an event or player’s contribution.

This is the kind of thing that makes someone an expert, rather than a paid amateur. If it is valuable in football, how much more should Christian teachers be encouraged to deliver expert insights into the text. We also want to avoid mentioning things just because they’re things that everyone else (say, without a Greek Bible) might not have noticed, but of all disciplines Christian teaching should be keenest to eradicate shallow teaching and superficial judgments.

Sciencey types often criticise Christians for choosing faith over science/reason (although there is actually no need for such a messy divorce), and yet this is not a Christian problem; it is a human problem. Christian faith isn’t actually the same thing as belief-without-foundation, but many believers treat it as such, yet this seems also to be the way in which most people relate to the world around them. Knowing something takes work; laziness and presumption are easy substitutes.

Amazing feats of presumption are everywhere. Take these three examples that I’ve come across in recent weeks.

1. ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ hates Ritalin

Pinterest tells me that this cartoon is the saddest thing some or other user has ever seen, and not because it’s a fake Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.

The idea is that Calvin’s parents finally succumbed and started giving him ‘pills’, presumably Ritalin, and as a result he no longer allows his imagination to carry him away on adventures, and look! by the end Hobbes is just… Hobbes has… died! Hobbes! Noooo! I hope that homework was worth it, pills!

It would be sad if indeed this is what Ritalin does, but is it? Does it actually alter the personality? Medically speaking, it wears off after 4 hours and leaves no trace of itself. Even if Hobbes did disappear, he’d be back again after a short while, and Calvin would have his homework out of the way too. Sure, it’d make a worse cartoon series, but not a worse child.

More to the point, is there a link between the inability to concentrate and a flourishing creative mind? Is imagination really just the same as lack of focus?

There is a pervasive (and childish) view of artists that they brood their way from place to place in fits of temper wreaking havoc and then instantaneously wrenching beauty and profundity from the chaos. Art is lightning bolts of inspiration—flashes of genius—and it is the gift of the true artist to barf out fully formed, finely crafted masterpieces.

From what I know about many of the world’s best artists and writers, their work ethic and ability to focus for long periods of time was phenomenal. Great art came from rigorous planning, continual rewrites, thinking, agonising, redoing. Some great art may happen in an instant, but most of it takes focus. Picasso could draw the essence of a bull in a deft flick (or two) of his wrist… but only because he spent thousands of drawings trying to learn what the essence of a bull is.

The unquestioning assumptions behind this cartoon play nicely into some of our favourite narratives: that the ‘creative’ person is quirky and weird and unique and impulsive; that medicating children is the imposition of some kind of chemical slavery, forcing them to become ‘just like everyone else’. On what grounds do we know any of that to be true besides ‘intuition’?

Kids who need Ritalin are sometimes incapable of functioning at a level that enables them even to become literate. Attention problems can (in these rare cases) be utterly debilitating. In most cases it is merely the difference between enjoying school (and keeping up), or finding everything a struggle. If there is a study that shows that Ritalin kills the imagination, I’d like to see it. Otherwise stop stigmatising good medicine on stupid grounds.

2. Preservatives and McDonalds

I hate the Fallen Arches as much as the next guy, but my eldest daughter has returned from school this term with an irrational fear of ‘preservatives’ because the phys-ed teacher taught them about the evils of fast-food.

The gist of it was that evil food is full of preservatives, whereas good, wholesome food is of the earth and made by mamma at a roaring hearth somewhere. The evidence? There is a 14-year-old McDonalds burger that has not rotted and is good as the day as it was bought. The only thing that rots is the pickle: the only natural, green thing in sight.

See? Preservatives are mummifying you from the inside.

I hope I look this good when I turn 14

Does it look the same as the day it was bought? No. It looks repulsive. Sure, but why hasn’t it rotted? As this excellent experiment points out, it’s because things that dry out don’t rot (the beef-jerky principle). The home-ground, 100% pure burger of similar thickness doesn’t rot either. And the pickle? Ironically the pickling process is a preservative measure, and yet it does rot.

Again, the preservative scaremongering plays into our favourite fables: All chemicals are bad, and they’re poisoning us. Mother Nature is all good all the time, if only we’d let her in. Classifying things as ‘chemicals’ is not precise enough description to function as a workable category—certainly not one that we can dismiss in totality as harmful when it is convenient to do so—and conversely, ‘natural’ in no way guarantees that a thing is not horrifically dangerous.

All natural goodness. No artificial colours or flavours.

Healthy eating is great, and I’m pleased that school is taking an interest in nutrition. But do they really need to propagate a good message by means of misinformation? It was a teacher who told them that there is a 14-year-old McDonalds burger being kept in showroom condition by preservatives, simultaneously misrepresenting the facts and inventing its cause by mere presumption. A minute of googling revealed that a scientific mind has already done the work for us of investigating the true cause. A teacher couldn’t even drum up the curiosity to google it.

3. Car Seats and Vaccines

A third thing that I came across this week that demonstrated the loose grip that we all have on good thinking and secure knowledge came via a friend who posted a link to a provocative article that points out how car seats are a danger to our children, cause autism, and are all just a corporate, money-grubbing conspiracy anyway (it’s a spoof on the anti-vaccine movement, but really quite enlightening). You should read it here now.

Enjoy your deathtrap, kid.

It exposes the barking-mad reasoning that so many of us use to justify certain conclusions—opposition to vaccinations in this example. Now it’s not especially important who ends up being right about vaccines; perhaps all those diseases did go away by themselves and Big Corporate is laughing all the way to the bank. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is the methods by which many or most campaigners have reached this conclusion, which clearly are wrong-headed and opposed to science and reason. These are the same muddled methods by which people justify all sorts of misleading and even downright evil conclusions (the idea that your car seat is made of poison and autism spores would qualify).

So here are three things from separate sources that have crossed my path in the last month, all of which are examples of the non-rational, presumptuous ways in which all kinds of people seem to deal with information, and all of which can be greatly helped (if not outright solved) by the application of logic and science. We could put an end to a lot of stupid opinions—both religious and secular—if we based our conclusions on hard-won knowledge rather than arm-chair presumption. Christians sometimes think of science as belonging in the ‘poison’ category, and vice versa. I hope that is one more unhelpful presumption that we can each leave behind.